WWS integrates almost a hundred other science portals, most of which are national in scope, while some are international. The chief US contribution is Science.gov, itself a federated portal which integrates numerous US federal agency research report portals. Both WWS and Science.gov were built and are operated by the Department of Energy’s Office of Scientific Information (OSTI). Deep Web Technologies is the amazing developer.

With a multilingual translation feature for results, WWS has captured scientists from across the globe. While Kindle may not support WorldWideScience for a bedtime story, the WWS mobile app can rock you softly to sleep in 10 different languages. And no need for a bookmark.

Combine this Thomson Reuters announcement with an earlier announcement from EBSCO that it is no longer allowing its content to be indexed in Primo with the fact that EBSCO and ProQuest are bitter competitors who don’t allow their content to be indexed in each other’s Discovery Service and one starts to see life threatening chinks in the Discovery Services armor.

Stay tuned for further developments and posts on this.

UPDATE: It seems that Thomson Reuters has changed their mind on discontinuing access. InfoDOCKET has posted a letter from Thomson Reuters regarding Discovery Service Access to Web of Science that mentions their agreement with Ex Libris and ProQuest. We’ll post additional news as we hear it.

Every once in a while, a blog will post a list of what they view as the best science search engines. DWT is always pleased when we see these, one such list was published on Le blog de Recherche-eveillee.com, a French blog devoted to revealing search tools in the “visible Web, the invisible web, the social web and real-time web”. The author, Beatrice Foenix-Riou, enumerated 5 categories in her post:

(Note that text was translated from French into English so these may not be exact.)

Deep Web Technologies is happy to see that out of the five categories, we have built 5 of the search engines included and hold the entire Multidisciplinary scientific portal category! Our search engines are:

Time Magazine’s current issue (November 11, 2013) cover story, “The Secret Web: Where Drugs, Porn and Murder Live Online,” reveals the dark side of the Deep Web, where criminals can hide from surveillance efforts to commit nefarious deeds anonymously. The buzz about the evils of the Dark Web (as Time’s Secret Web is commonly referred to) started early last month when Ross Ulbright was arrested in San Francisco “on charges of alleged murder for hire and narcotics trafficking violation” and identified as the founder and chief operator of Silk Road. Ulbright, known as “Dread Pirate Roberts”, is accused of running what is described in Wikipedia as an underground website sometimes called the “Amazon.com of illegal drugs” or the “eBay for drugs.” And, of course, the government shut down Silk Road.

As founder and president of Deep Web Technologies, I take exception to the article’s referral of the dark regions of the Web broadly as the Deep Web. The term Deep Web, first coined in 2000, refers to huge areas of the Internet that serve legitimate organizations and the public. Not all of the Deep Web is dark. In fact, most of it isn’t. In fairness to the Time Magazine article authors, Grossman and Newton-Small, they do make this point early on:

Technically the Deep Web refers to the collection of all the websites and databases that search engines like Google don’t or can’t index, which in terms of the sheer volume of information is many times larger than the Web as we know it.

The deep web is everywhere, and it has much more content than the surface web. Online TV guides, price comparison web-sites, services to find out of print books, those driving direction sites, services that track the value of your stocks and report news about companies within your holdings – these are just a few examples of valuable services built around searching deep web content.

But, not only is the Deep Web of interest to consumers, it’s of particular value to academicians, scientists, researchers, and a whole slew of business people who rely on timely access to cutting edge Deep Web content to maintain a competitive edge.

Federated search facilitates research by helping users find high-quality documents in more specialized or remote corners of the Internet. Federated search applications excel at finding scientific, technical, and legal documents whether they live in free public sites or in subscription sites. This makes federated search a vital technology for students and professional researchers. For this reason, many libraries and corporate research departments provide federated search applications to their students and staff.

Hopefully you’re convinced that there’s valuable information in the Deep Web. Now, no one knows exactly how big the Deep Web is compared to the Surface Web that Google, Bing, and the others crawl but it’s likely that the Deep Web is hundreds of times larger. This is great when you have access to tools like Deep Web Technologies’ Explorit search engine but it might also make you nervous wondering how you can find that needle in the haystack in a web that is hundreds of times larger than the one you’re familiar with that is overwhelming you with too much information and too much junk mixed in with the good stuff.

Update: I have also written an email to Time Magazine which I’ve copied below. I don’t know if they will publish it or not, but I certainly hope that they will recognize that the Deep Web is much more than a haven for criminals.

Dear Editor:

As someone who makes his living providing access to the legitimate parts of the Deep Web I am very concerned that your article paints a dark picture of the Deep Web as a whole. The company I founded, Deep Web Technologies, Inc., searches Deep Web sources on behalf of scientists, researchers, students and business people. My concern is that the public, and my potential customers, will equate all things related to the Deep Web with dark criminal activity. Please help me to correct this potential misperception to the reality that the Deep Web is about those areas of the Web that contain high quality content and that the Dark Web is just a fringe neighborhood within the Deep Web that most of us will never venture into.